OK. I’m getting out the fireproof suit because it’s coming and my hackles have been raised by a number of comments on the list of late.
Disclaimer:
No disrespect intended to the individuals of any *specific* thread. I’m a little frustrated over energy wasted on pedantic top/bottom posting crap rather than understanding the technology and industry best-practices which have been built upon for years.
I’m not against change – far from it. I’m against throwing out good work and history done by an entire industry to make telecom one of the most complex and yet stable computing environments (class 4/5 entrants from Nortel, Lucent, etc.) We should learn from and extend best practices where they do not address circumstances which weren’t available 20 years ago (or more) but not to ignore proven practices simply because the transport mechanism is now a packet instead of a circuit.
I’m not alone.
Here’s the deal with Asterisk as an Answering Machine – industry best practices.
- don’t put phones in parallel with the PBX except for the single, emergency phone next to the PBX.
- PBX’s are directors of calls. For it to direct, it must have control. For it to have control, you can’t answer some calls in parallel.
- even if it is a home/1-phone-office, the PBX accepts and directs the call to phones *behind* it. The phone rings, if you don’t answer it goes to voicemail.
If you don’t follow this practice you will have:
- timing issues with the answering of analogue phones – rings are not always consistent.
- people will pick up “just in time” and will have to compete with voicemail.
- you won’t get accurate CDR’s which means you can do proper billing reconcilliation, chargebacks or help you understand your call paths and volumes to help troubleshoot down the road. (You may not care about bill reconcilliation or chargebacks but remember – this is a PBX (aka business phone system) and that’s what business does so that’s the business model that is supported by most practices.
Just to prove I’m not too old for change and acceptance of new technology…
- If you get charged by the connect from your provider, route by DID but don’t answer it in an IVR. That way you don’t get billed.
- Once you are looking to route to a phone behind the PBX, hey – check your jabber status. Is your desktop in IDLE, you’re not there – send it to your cell phone. Oh, BTW – change the CLID on the way back out to append “H-” to the caller so you know it came redirected from the house. This helps you decide context of the caller and decide if you want to answer or *how* you will answer.
There is no reason to not have all phones behind the PBX. There is nothing mandating you to dial a 9, or similar to get an outside line. Be creative. Use internal extensions that don’t conflict with your local calling area exchanges. Then you write dialplans for the phones that will dial right away and not make you wait to timeout on the 10-digit+ dial.
There are *way* too many cool things we can do with Asterisk that worry about top/bottom posting. Let’s get back to reading docs – asterisk &
industry practices.
Fireproof suit on and buttoned up. I’m ready.
-dbc
